Marine - Onyx

I do not like how my team quits I stay and fight put up a positive score and then lose rank due to a loss. I'm penalized for team mates leaving

You're not penalized for teammates leaving. You're penalized for losing. I'm sure there are other games where the enemy team loses a player and you get an easy win.

343 can't soften your CSR hit when a teammate leaves... otherwise people would cheat the system horribly by having a friend quit out of the fireteam every time they are going to lose. Over time it should balance out.

Marine - Iron

I just searched the Big Team Battle playlist for 9min 50sec with a full 8-person lobby. We loaded into a game of Dispelled CTF at 4min 50sec and then it searched for a single final player for the next 5min. Couldn't fill the slot so people from the enemy team left and the search eventually timed out sending us all back to the lobby.

I then solo-searched on my alt account in BTB. I got the "Unable to Match" error without finding a match after 5min of searching on "Expanded." I'm getting off for today. Waiting on a game for this long is just wearisome.

I play with the BTB Spartan Company ExO Delta Gaming and we just want things to go back to how they were right before the matchmaking search changes. It's causing people to not want to play anymore and I can't blame them. I keep telling my friends "they'll fix it," but I'm starting to lose hope as they steadily leave. Please reduce the search times back to what they once were. I just want to play games in BTB again....

Recruit - Bronze

I agree....my friends and I seem to now be spending more time waiting for a game than playing the game. I get how the changes are supposed to improve the game by making matches more equal...but this new experience is awful. My friends and I play a lot of Halo and usually just roll with the tweaks and patches (and their unintended consequences) but this kind of realtime beta-testing nonsense is making the game much less playable and much much less fun.

Recruit - Gold

343 Industries

Josh, here's the first game I've seen under these new MM parameters that made me scratch my head. https://www.halowaypoint.com/en-us/games/halo-5-guardians/xbox-one/mode/warzone/matches/291a5aa8-8ec1-40a4-aad6-591c0094d4e9/players/jaypops20?gameHistoryMatchIndex=0&gameHistoryGameModeFilter=All

I was watching my buddy play (he's probably got an OK MMR but nothing crazy), and he matched against a team of known uber-sweats (at least 8, maybe 12). He had nobody great on his team, looked like mostly randoms. How did this match happen?

Recruit - Bronze

just played a few....seems to be matching much faster than it was earlier for sure....but there were only three of us this time....it was taking a long time with a full fireteam earlier today. Are you in a full team?

Marine - Onyx

OK I played a bunch of WZA tonight with the 12-man fireteams allowed. My first impression is that it's sadly not going to work. Why? Because the bad apples in this game are already abusing it and will drive people away, just like last year. It's going to become impossible to play these playlists unless you have a 12-man, and that's going to tank the population.

I'm probably a high MMR WZA player (over 2.0), and i was searching tonight in fireteams between 3-5 people (of similarly high MMR). We matched 12-man, high MMR teams 5x in a row. 3 of those were against the highest MMR team that still searches in WZ (I won't call them out by name since that's against forum rules, but everyone who plays sweaty WZ knows the group of guys I'm talking about), who farmed us on a Twitch stream in 2 of those games, by letting us cap the first base then spawn-farmed at the second base. (Thanks for doing your part to poison this game, guys)

The fundamental problem is that the match-ups weren't even close to competitive by MMR. In several cases, they had a 12-man of 3.5+ MMR players (probably including a few smurfs to drive down their MMR), while we had our small fireteam, a couple randoms around MMR 2.0, and then several randoms who were so helpless that I can only assume their MMRs were well below 2.0. It wouldn't be so much of an issue if we'd had a 12-man matching against them, or if there were very high MMR randoms searching the playlist, but there just isn't sufficient population in this playlist to give us randoms who can hold their own in these games.

As it stands, it's a nightmare to search this playlist solo queue or with a small fireteam, if your MMR is at all on the higher-end. Josh, you claimed this wouldn't happen, but as I suspected, we just match the few guys running an uber-sweat lobby with all 4+ MMRs, over and over, because we're the only people with MMRs high enough to match them. And of course, they delight in farming us repeatedly. I'm not sure I will even touch this playlist anymore unless I'm playing with 10-12 people. It's just impossible to get a decent match otherwise at the higher MMRs.

By the way.... To the 12-man teams who are blatantly farming people in WZ and WZA right now, you have nobody but yourselves to blame if 12-man is taken away.

Edit: to clarify, I WISH/HOPE 12-man could somehow be viable. It'd be awesome. But from my experience tonight it causes at lot of problems for smaller fireteams and solo players, so I'm not sure it can be... Maybe if the population were higher...?

I say don't cap the MMRs to 2.0 SDs. Don't cap it at all. If people with a 5.6 SD can't find a match, whatever. Just take it as a "you're better than everyone else, so you don't have anything to prove." I think there's a place on the forum where you can post about getting a group together. Maybe these high MMR teams should organize themselves and coordinate a time to play against other teams. And what really is going to happen when/if the top 0.1% of the population leaves as a result of that? The other 90% of the population isn't going to have a sour taste in their mouths when they get roflstomped every game and end up quitting the game out of frustration. Which is worse: having 100 people leave Halo 5, or having 100,000 people leave?

Recruit - Bronze

Here's what I noticed about the playlist (before the issue yesterday) while being in a very high MMR team:

Wait times were pretty good (much less than 5 min)

Games were competitive when we were against a few specific teams (Nas, Rippers, ALG)

Games were very lopsided victories against everyone else

If 12-man is able to come back (really hope it can), I'm thinking the matchmaking will need to be tightened up a bit. The question is whether the playlist can support tighter controls long-term when the only data we have is from the very first day 12-man came out (and on a weekend to boot). Gotta trust the good Doctor on that one.

Marine - Onyx

Here's what I noticed about the playlist (before the issue yesterday) while being in a very high MMR team:

Wait times were pretty good (much less than 5 min)

Games were competitive when we were against a few specific teams (Nas, Rippers, ALG)

Games were very lopsided victories against everyone else

If 12-man is able to come back (really hope it can), I'm thinking the matchmaking will need to be tightened up a bit. The question is whether the playlist can support tighter controls long-term when the only data we have is from the very first day 12-man came out (and on a weekend to boot). Gotta trust the good Doctor on that one.

This agrees with what I'm seeing - I was mostly playing in small fireteams or solo, and tended to be on the other end of those lopsided stompings. I can imagine there would be fun games if you really had a 12v12, but otherwise the large fireteams of high MMR players will stomp everyone.

It's possible that if Josh implement the adjustment that accounts for coordinated teams having an effectively higher MMR, it may make things better. But the fact is that groups of MMR 4+ people are going to party up in To12s, and there just aren't enough remaining 4+ MMR players searching solo or in small teams to compete with the team of all 4+ MMR. And a group of 4+ MMR players is going to demolish a group of 2.0 MMR players.

Same idea goes for slightly less elite To12s, although to a lesser extent.

Spartan - Gold

JIP is out of control. 9 out of my 10 games in BTB were JIP with some of them ending shortly after I joined. Yeah, it's good that I'm getting games, but I'd rather wait a little longer over joining some crap game where the other team in a party is already stomping my team.

The fundamental problem is that the match-ups weren't even close to competitive by MMR. In several cases, they had a 12-man of 3.5+ MMR players (probably including a few smurfs to drive down their MMR), while we had our small fireteam, a couple randoms around MMR 2.0, and then several randoms who were so helpless that I can only assume their MMRs were well below 2.0.

As it stands, it's a nightmare to search this playlist solo queue or with a small fireteam, if your MMR is at all on the higher-end. Josh, you claimed this wouldn't happen, but as I suspected, we just match the few guys running an uber-sweat lobby with all 4+ MMRs, over and over, because we're the only people with MMRs high enough to match them.

I feel like this is exactly what's gonna happen in BTB as well when it's implemented.

Marine - Onyx

I say don't cap the MMRs to 2.0 SDs. Don't cap it at all. If people with a 5.6 SD can't find a match, whatever. Just take it as a "you're better than everyone else, so you don't have anything to prove." I think there's a place on the forum where you can post about getting a group together. Maybe these high MMR teams should organize themselves and coordinate a time to play against other teams. And what really is going to happen when/if the top 0.1% of the population leaves as a result of that? The other 90% of the population isn't going to have a sour taste in their mouths when they get roflstomped every game and end up quitting the game out of frustration. Which is worse: having 100 people leave Halo 5, or having 100,000 people leave?

IMO this is probably too extreme an option. Some of the highest MMR players are also some of the most active players, and with the To6 limit it was often possible to find competitive, fun matches for hour after hour, at many times of the day. So you don't want to totally lose that playerbase. You probably need some MMR cap to make MM effective. But maybe it would be worth raising it to 3.0, loosening the player-to-player MMR limit, but tightening the team-to-team MMR limit. That should have the following effect: Very high (3+) MMR players could still find games searching solo in groups of 2-3, but if they are searching in a To12 they really could only match against people who could compete, since their total MMR would be ~36. I honestly don't mind periodically matching the WZ "champ" rank kids when they roll in a big fireteam. But I can't stand matching them when I'm in small fireteam and we get random teammates who are totally helpless and just feed kills all game (and it adds insult to injury when we get farmed for 6 minutes). It would be tolerable if I got actual high-skill teammates who could do something useful.

Recruit - Onyx

Ranks, farming, mmr, roflsromping... I don’t care. What I want is the ability to find a game. All of these changes and testing have resulted in an inability for me to find a game off peak hours.

I HATE smurfs. I think they are a cancer on the community. I have made several suggestions how to eliminate their effect on matchmaking and balancing. THAT SAID, I’m going to have to create one to find wz games. That’s what this has come to.